Going through Atwood’s poetry again recently, I found myself returning to “You Begin”, a poem I’ve always felt drawn to — partly because it seems so straightforward at first glance, yet always hints at something more profound. In this, its form mirrors also its content. Most interpretations I’ve read frame it in terms of maternal love, or the complications and insights of teaching, focusing on the challenging task of explaining the world’s complexity to a child who doesn’t yet have the language or experience to grasp it. Personally,  I’ve always liked the poem for its elegance beneath its simple imagery: How, by formal way of an instructive educational lesson, it illustrates how language itself often fails to adequately convey immediate, lived experience for which there is no linguistic substitute. Language can be so clumsy when it tries to bridge the gap between the word and the world.

You Begin is a poem about the weight of language, signification, the limitations of knowledge, embodiment, and the quiet proximity of danger. It keeps returning to the body (more specifically:  the hand)  as the final fallback when signification falters.

“You begin this way:  /  This is your hand,  /  this is your eye…”

The teaching begins in the body. Before abstraction and metaphor, the child is rooted in the tangible. The body is the site of first knowledge, and the hand becomes the motif of return. Later in the poem (and, by metonymical extension, in life), when language falters and experience exceeds comprehension, it becomes the anchoring concept.
Continue reading Atwood’s “You Begin:” A Reading →